Emergency Prepardness - Water

Water has been something that I have been focusing on over the last month. J came home from school at the end of last year talking about the hazard of fluoride. He wanted me to start buying bottled water for everyone in the family. When I explained how expensive that would be he stopped asking, but he did not stop obsessing.

I have been drinking bottled purified water ever since I was about twelve. That was when I had an allergic reaction to drinking water. I was miserable, covered from head to toe in hives. We think that the water I drank just had a high content of sulfur - which I had already found to be intolerant to. While I should probably be more concerned about ways I am getting sulfur in my body, I have mostly just focused on drinking purified water. Occasionally, I will still have reactions when I drink unknown water, although never as bad as when I was twelve.

The more I began to look up water options the more I ran across stories about water being infested with radiation, fluoride, or other items that make me shiver. I realized that providing my children with clean water was a priority. The question is what was I to do? We live in an apartment which eliminated a whole house filtering system. I thought about getting water delivered. I worried about it being left outside our door, where we would put the stand, and how much it would keep costing us. We would be forever tied to a water service.

I finally decided that I would order a Berkley Water system. The best deal I came across was on Amazon - where I could get the Big Berkley and two fluoride filters (a must to ease J's mind) for about forty dollars less then what I could find elsewhere without the fluoride filters. Best decision ever. I will write a through review at a different time.

Water Storage

With our water supply in place I wanted to focus on how we were going to store water for an emergency. The Berkley is great for filtering water - but what if we do not have access to water?

There were many options that I ran across for emergency water storage. You can buy a handy contraption that will use your water for water storage, if you have some advance notice of an emergency. While a great edition to an emergency kit, it still requires enough planning to get your bathtub filled up. I also wanted water stored in our apartment.

There are many tricks to storing water. You can use two litter bottles, storing the water out of the sun. Yet, this is impractical if you do not already buy the soda. It is the same cost of just buying the jugs of water at the store. I also considered this, yet twelve gallons of water can take up a lot of space individually packaged. It also did not help with the whole concept of saving money by not having to buy water.

I finally decided on buying two 6 gallon water containers, and filling them up with the filtered water. Not only does this work as water storage, we can also pack these up and use them when we travel. This way we will cycle through the water, and I do not have to buy bottles every time we go on a road trip.

For storage you are suppose to have 1 gallon of water per family member, per day. For our family of four that is twelve gallons of water. Right now we are working on a 72 hour supply. Ultimately I will need to buy a water barrel. For our targeted three month supply we would need 360 gallons of water, or approximately seven barrels. If we had a house, that we would actually stay at in case of an emergency then I would line them in our garage and basement. In our current apartment, we will stick with the 72 hours of water, and buy extra filters for our Berkley water filter. We can always grab that and take it with us.